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… At four o’clock in the afternoon, we’d parted
for one week only … Alas,
that week became an eternity.
[1918; 1919]
To Stay
One in the morning it must have been,
or half past one.
In a corner of that dive;
in back of the wooden partition.
Apart from the two of us, the place completely empty.
A kerosene lamp barely shed some light.
The vigilant servant was sleeping by the door.
No one would have seen us. But
we were so on fire for each other
that caution was beyond us anyway.
Our clothes were half undone—we weren’t wearing much,
since it was blazing hot, a heavenly July.
Delight in flesh amidst
clothes half undone:
quick baring of flesh—the image of it
has crossed twenty-six years; and now has come
to stay here in this poetry.
[1918; 1919]
Of the Jews (50 A.D.)
Painter and poet, runner and thrower,
Endymion’s beauty: Ianthes, son of Antonius.
From a family close to the Synagogue.
“The days that I most value are the ones
when I abandon the aesthetic quest,
when I forsake the beauty and rigor of the Hellenic,
with its overriding preoccupation
with perfectly formed and perishable white limbs.
And I become what I would like
always to remain: of the Jews, of the holy Jews, the son.”
A bit too heated, this declaration of his. “Always
remain of the Jews, of the holy Jews—”
But he didn’t remain one at all.
the Hedonism and Art of Alexandria
made the boy into their devotee.
[1912; <1919?]
Imenus
“… it should be loved all the more,
the pleasure that’s attained unwholesomely and in corruption;
only rarely finding the body that feels things as it wants to—
the pleasure that, unwholesomely and in corruption, produces
a sensual intensity, which good health does not know …”
A fragment of a missive
from the youth Imenus (of patrician stock), infamous
in Syracuse for dissipation,
in the dissipated times of Michael the Third.
[1915; 1919; 1919]
Aboard the Ship
It certainly resembles him, this small
pencil likeness of him.
Quickly done, on the deck of the ship:
an enchanting afternoon.
The Ionian Sea all around us.
It resembles him. Still, I remember him as handsomer.
To the point of illness: that’s how sensitive he was,
and it illumined his expression.
Handsomer, he seems to me,
now that my soul recalls him, out of Time.
Out of Time. All these things, they’re very old—
the sketch, and the ship, and the afternoon.
[1919; 1919]
Of Demetrius Soter (162–150 B.C.)
His every expectation turned out wrong!
He used to imagine that he’d do celebrated deeds,
would end the shame that since the time of the Battle
of Magnesia had ground his homeland down.
That Syria again would be a mighty power,
with her armies, with her fleets,
with her great encampments, with her wealth.
He endured it, grew embittered in Rome
when he sensed, in the conversation of his friends,
the scions of the great houses,
in the midst of all the delicacy and politesse
that they showed toward him, toward the son
of King Seleucus Philopator—
when he sensed that nonetheless there was always a hidden
disdain for the dynasties of the Greek East:
which were in decline, not up to serious affairs,
quite unfit for the leadership of peoples.
He’d withdraw, alone, and grow indignant, and swear
that it wouldn’t be the way they thought, at all.
Look, he has the will:
would struggle, would do it, would rise up.
If only he could find a way to reach the East,
manage to get away from Italy—
and all of this power that he has
in his soul, all this vehemence,
he’d spread it to the people.
Ah, if only he could be in Syria!
He was so little when he left his homeland
that he only dimly remembers what it looks like.
But in his thoughts he’s always studied it
like something sacred you approach on bended knee,
like an apparition of a beautiful place, like a vision
of cities and of harbors that are Greek.—
And now?
